Monthly Archives: March 2011

Was digging through Youtube videos lately and ran across some videos of CG animated characters and is the way of Youtube ended up spending way too much time digging through a ton of “related videos” and stuff.

Was struck by how realistic and nice some of the work is, up until they open their mouths anyway. Seems that’s still the weakest point in the resulting in the whole uncanny valley thing.

Here’s some of the more impressive videos I found.

The vast majority are female characters, not sure if that says something about me or the people making the stuff. =D

It shares a title with a book I really loved, On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, but it doesn’t seem like it shares anything else with the book except for the most basic of concepts and the character Blackbeard.

The original Deus Ex was a really great game. One of my all time top 10. Great story, good acting, good writing, interesting gameplay and tons of options.

Not open-ended like modern day sandbox games, but allowing you to choose from a variety of different potential ways to resolve each task.

I’ve probably replayed that game more than any other game.

Then, they made sequel. The sequel was… disappointing. Nowhere as good as the original.

Now they are making a new one. I have had my reservations, but so far the videos and everything look alright (other than the weird square swords jutting from his elbows, seems they went too far into the impractical/unbeleivable to try and make something that seemed “cool”).

Unfortunately, they are outsourcing the development of the PC version…

Jean-François Dugas, director of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, announced in an interview with Shacknews that Eidos Montreal is outsourcing the PC version of the classic PC game to a joint in the Netherlands called Nixxes.

This is sad news indeed. All the more so because although upon hearing the name of the company it is being outsourced to, most people initially have a “Who? The Netherlands???” response, further research shows even more worrying info. These are the guys who did the port of Kain and Lynch 2.

Having not played the game on console, I can’t say for certain whether this was a terrible port, or just a terrible game, but it’s not something I would proudly proclaim and expect to fill people with confidence. It had some clunky and obviously “console port” control/configuration issues and the multiplayer/coop is so susceptible to lag over distance, that it made the game nearly impossible to play with friends back home (Me being in Japan) without us constantly teleporting on each others’ screens and other weird behavior like enemies who moved so fast they might as well have been the Flash.

But this is not only seriously disappointing, but almost like a betrayal with yet another PC series relegating the fans who are responsible for it’s original popularity to third place. I suppose we should be happy we get a release at all.